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Think Before You Cut And PasteBy: Penny, EzineArticles Managing Editor

In the past, members have been encouraged to repurpose or “repackage” content from their blog or website as articles. After all, you’ve already written it once – if you can get the same information distributed across multiple platforms, why wouldn’t you?

However, that’s not to say it’s necessarily a simple cut-and-paste job. After all, your site may allow things that we don’t allow and you’ve geared your content that way. The best practice when submitting something from your blog or website is to give your existing content a once-over and tailor it for our platform.

Keep an eye out for these 6 potential pitfalls:

Article Body Cut Off – The top and bottom of your article body doesn’t begin and/or end the way you intended.

“In this blog…” or “In this post…” – Language like this could confuse your reader. Swap “blog” and “post” for “article” as a quick fix.

Promotion – Save the promotion for your Resource Box. Any references to your company, website or product should be moved here.

Anchor Text Links – Be sure HTML coding from the original article is copied properly. If the anchor text says “Click Here” the reader should be able to click on it and be redirected to the intended website.

Pictures and Video – Pictures and embedded video are not allowed in the article body. Direct the reader to your website for this information.

“Garbage” Code and Special Characters – Sometimes a simple copy and paste will bring with it a string of programming language and characters that we don’t allow in the article body. Our system doesn’t support, for example, Kanji or Chinese characters. If it’s not an English character, chances are it won’t show up. Check to make sure your article is free of this before copying and pasting.

You don’t have to drastically rewrite your existing content to submit it as an article, just take a couple minutes to avoid these basic, easy-to-catch mistakes.

Leave a comment and let us know if we missed any of the other hurdles that can get in the way of a simple cut/paste of your existing material.

As someone who has written a lot in the past, but is new to the EzinArticles site, I have enjoyed and learned from your many excellent resources. I haven’t yet come up with a question that hasn’t been covered. You folks make it easy to write great content. Thanks. Ross Leadbetter M.Ed.

I regularly repackage my articles to use in my own blog. EzineArticles is always my first port of call when I write a new article. Once it has been accepted, I then repackage it and add additional content such as images or embedded video for use in my blog.

Kind of the reverse of what you are saying here but it goes to show I consider EzineArticles an authority for my fresh content.

I have always re-write my articles before posting to EzineArticles. But, the only problem i have is those that copy my content without crediting me. I have entirely stopped submitting to EzineArticles.

I agree, I’ve also thought that the Blogger re-purposed articles ought to really work better in re-titled their piece, as most blog posts are very short and cute, but hardly descriptive at all.

I had a thought, “what if” – EzineArticles allowed an additional sentence to the posted titles. A secondary title box for instance. Why? Because it seems all the news media has titles + a long descriptive sentence which explains what the reader will be reading. This way when a person goes to the search engine, they will see the expanded title and not feel they’ve been tricked? The additional paragraph may not make it all into the search engine, but it would be immediately following, perhaps no breaks, only a percieved break when reading the article here.

Penny – I have to say that this is possibly the worst advice I have seen on this blog.

There is absolutely no way people should be submitting content to this site that has previously been uploaded to their own website or blog.

In the future, if they followed your advice, content that was originally found on their website could have been re-published on many other sites – and mainly poor quality ones. Why poor quality ones? Any webmaster with any real knowledge of website promotion would never use duplicate content.

After the latest Google Mayday update, the watch word is quality. Even if there is no such thing as a current “duplicate content penalty” there sure will be in the future.

Personally as MD of EzineArticles I thought you would have known better.

Steve, while I disagree with certain parts of your statement, it has occurred to me that with the newest Google Updates, I have found that more long-tail searchers are bringing up better results, and this, it is my belief that EzineArticles ought to extent the number of spaces in the “Key word” submission box by 10 characters. Why? Well, the other day I was writing an article about a country with a long name, and about a city with a long name, and a couple of events with long names;

And Obviously, I ran out of words. I guess if someone is writing Internet articles of lower grade reading levels it may not matter. But with regards to Google’s new updates it would for long-tail searching, which Google appears to be giving more credit too for those who wish to search more in-depth, at least this is what I am noticing by the emails I get from my articles and the searches I do for information. I believe their new push towards quality is coming along, I noticed the difference right away, maybe some have not.

Wish I would have known about the copy and paste issues. It took several attempts to get my article approved because the editor kept adding additional characters.. It was very frustrating…
Thanks for sharing this with us. It should make my next submission much easier..
Cheers!

Thanks for the tips Penny. I’m not a big fan of “cut and paste” myself. I prefer fresh content so I generally rewrite my articles with a different approach each time. I find this a useful technique to use with PLR articles as well.
Cheers
John

This shows up something I had misunderstood. I really thought that the main point of submitting to ezine directories was to give blogs much wider readership. My blogs aren’t sales pitches, or I may have thought differently. I certainly don’t have time to write completely separate articles for both my website and ezine directories.